Weight Watchers Revamps Its Magic Formula

An apple and a cookie can have the same number of calories. But which should you eat? Until recently, Weight Watchers couldn't say.
Photo: Bela Borsodi

Like many Weight Watchers members, David Kirchhoff has a Before picture and an After picture. In the Before, he looks jolly but hefty, all cheeks and jowls, the result of years of eating obliviously. A 32-year-old with a biomedical engineering degree from Duke, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and a job as a management consultant, he’s clearly been paying more attention to his studies and advancement than his appearance or health. Things aren’t so bad that he would get the Kevin Smith treatment from Southwest Airlines, but it’s easy to imagine him breaking into a sweat carrying a pint of Ben & Jerry’s up a flight of stairs. He’ll soon be diagnosed with high blood pressure and high cholesterol. His doctor suggests a statin.

Now the After, more than a decade later: close-cropped blond hair, 34-inch waist, and 15 percent body fat on his 6′ 3″ frame. In a form-fitting suit, the 45-year-old father of two cuts the figure of a Marine sergeant 20 years his junior. This is a picture of a man in control.

Kirchhoff’s tale of weight gain is a common one. Between the end of high school and his midthirties, a slowing metabolism, changing lifestyle, and some disposable income all conspired to reshape his body. Looking back, it’s not hard to see where things went wrong. “In college, it was all-you-can-eat—10,000 gallons of beer, pizza, the whole thing,” he recalls. “Then I got a job with a lot of traveling. There was life on the road, room service. It became really easy to have any kind of awesome food any time I wanted. Take-out Chinese, delivery Chinese, deep-dish Chicago pizza, barbecue, huge breakfasts. There was literally no restraint. If you look at my swing from high school to my peak, it’s about 75 pounds.”

Unlike most, however, Kirchhoff found his way back to fighting trim. He entirely credits Weight Watchers. Walking the aisles of a mom-and-pop grocery store in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, he parses the contents of the shelves to demonstrate what the company taught him about the effect of various foods on his body. Chips, pretzels, prepared meals loaded with oils and butter, blue cheese dressing: all obviously evil. Orange juice, sun-dried tomatoes, and hummus: surprisingly bad. Then there’s the good stuff: any (nonprocessed) fruit and (nonstarchy) vegetables, shellfish, and whole-grain bread, as well as chicken sausage, flank steak, skinless turkey breast, and pork tenderloin. “You know what’s funny? People tend to run away from bacon, but it’s not bad,” he says, picking up a vacuum-sealed package in the meat case and tapping the nutritional information into a calculator app on his iPhone. “And turkey bacon is a great deal.”

If Kirchhoff sounds like the perfect spokesperson for Weight Watchers, it’s no accident. He’s not just one of the dieting giant’s million-odd members around the globe, he’s the guy in charge: In 2006, he became the company’s president and CEO. And lately he’s been guiding the sprawling enterprise through a sort of renaissance.

In the past year, Kirchhoff has crafted a corporate After picture as impressive as his own. In the midst of protracted economic malaise, he’s boosted online membership by 64 percent and increased attendance at North American meetings by 14 percent. He’s breathed new life into the brand, posted impressive revenue and profit growth, and doubled the company’s market cap to, as of mid November, roughly $5 billion.

The story of how he’s managed to do all this starts with Kirchhoff ripping out the foundation of Weight Watchers in the name of science. Actually, it starts with a hunch that the science underlying the company’s venerable weight-loss formula—the very formula that helped Kirchhoff lose all that weight and made his own After picture possible—was flawed.

In 1980, 15 percent of adult Americans were obese, defined as having a minimum body mass index of 30, or roughly 200 pounds on a 5′ 8″ frame. Today, more than a third of us qualify. Throw in the pudgy and portly—a BMI of 25 or more, or 165 pounds on that 5′ 8″ frame—and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that two-thirds of us are overweight. The downsides aren’t just aesthetic. Our corpulence is making us sick, and we’re all paying the bill. Treatments for obesity-related conditions such as diabetes, chronic joint pain, asthma, heart disease, and several types of cancer account for an estimated $147 billion annually, or roughly 10 percent of the nation’s total health care outlay. That’s 50 percent more than the cost of smoking-related treatments.

A fat and sickly society has many fathers, including agricultural subsidy policies, traffic, screen time, sedentary lifestyles, and the increased energy density of our foods. But on an individual level, obesity, at least among adults, is a disease of choice. For most of us, obesity comes from repeatedly making the wrong decisions about what to eat. And whatever your preconceptions about Weight Watchers, its rah-rah tactics, or its bubbly celebrity spokespeople, it’s a provably effective tool for making better choices.

The program works, and peer-reviewed science has repeatedly shown this. Most recently, the medical journal The Lancet detailed the findings of a one-year randomized clinical trial initiated in 2007 by researchers from the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, the Technical University of Munich, and the University of Sydney. Eight hundred overweight or obese subjects were split into two camps. One group went to general practice MDs for weight-loss advice, and the other went to Weight Watchers. In all three countries, the medical counsel group showed an average weight loss of about 5 pounds at the one-year mark. Going for medical counseling worked. But members of the Weight Watchers group did better: On average, they lost 11 pounds.

Weight Watchers CEO David Kirchhoff lost 35 pounds on the original Points program. Despite this success, he felt the system could be improved.
Photo: Henry Leutwyler

This makes it all the more strange that Kirchhoff decided it was time for the program to change. Until the end of 2010, members participated in a dieting regimen called Points, in which all foods and drinks were assigned a numeric value, based primarily on their caloric content. Members received a daily allocation of points based on their height, weight, age, and gender. They also got a weekly stipend of extra points to use at their discretion and could earn more points through exercise. This system, which boiled down to a formula for caloric restriction, had been in place for close to a decade when Kirchhoff took the helm. Despite his personal success with Points, the program’s agnostic approach to calories nagged at him. A member could theoretically go on an all-donut diet and still be in the program’s good graces. “Think about it. It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and under the old program, we’d have a member who is thinking, ‘I can have an apple, which is two points, or a cookie snack pack, which is also two points,'” Kirchhoff says. “It didn’t feel right,”

So when Kirchhoff became CEO, one of his first official actions was to call a meeting of his top lieutenants, including his chief scientific officer, Karen Miller-Kovach. At the meeting he asked a simple question. “If we knew everything we know now when we developed Points, would it look exactly the way it does?” he remembers saying. “And Karen being Karen, because she has no filter, looked back at me and said, ‘No.'”

As part of her job, Miller-Kovach and her team constantly follow the latest trends in nutritional science. A few years before the meeting, for example, they had explored a concept called the glycemic index, or GI, which establishes a hierarchy of carbohydrates based on their effect on blood glucose. The body converts some carbs—like those found in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and nuts—into glucose slowly. They tend not to cause blood sugar spikes and are thus said to have a low GI quotient. In 2004, Miller-Kovach commissioned a clinical trial in France in which subjects followed a Points program that also pushed them toward low GI foods. The study showed that the dual system resulted in higher levels of satiety. “One of the key factors that can derail people who are trying to lose weight is that they’re hungry,” says the 56-year-old dietitian who also has an MBA from Baldwin-Wallace College. “They feel deprived. It’s difficult to sustain a behavior change for a long time if it’s uncomfortable.” Unfortunately, the modified system didn’t increase weight loss.

But combining the broad notion of satiety with other new ideas in nutrition might. One promising avenue of research was a concept known as the thermic effect of food. This describes how the body works to metabolize various types of calories. It takes more effort to metabolize protein calories, for example, so you store fewer of these. Meanwhile, Miller-Kovach knew that a calorie of protein also provides the greatest degree of satiety, followed by a calorie of fiber-containing carbohydrate, nonfiber carbs, and finally, a calorie of fat. So eating protein means you absorb fewer calories, but also feel full longer. All this meshes well with another concept called energy density, which had played a role in the original Points system. The notion of energy density holds that people tend to eat the same volume of food no matter the caloric content, so an effective weight-loss strategy is to fill up on foods that are less dense with energy. Miller-Kovach felt that together these concepts collectively represented an important advancement in our understanding of how the human body processes food. Simply put, not all calories are equal, and so, for the first time in Weight Watchers’ history, she felt the organization needed to develop a system that moved radically beyond just counting calories.

After the meeting with Kirchhoff, Miller-Kovach and her team started looking for ways to combine all this research and make it scale for a million members. “We take science, pools of evidence, and we distill it, we simplify it,” she says. “I spend my life translating science to businesspeople and business to scientists. I consider myself bilingual.”

The result is found in U.S. Patent Application 2010/0055271:

This new formula distinguishes among calories and ascribes values to a given food based on its makeup of protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. From an eater’s perspective, the formula brings both good and bad news. Members receive more points under the new system. But many foods cost more points now, including alcohol. The name change—from Points to PointsPlus—may have made the program sound like a minor upgrade, but the kernel underneath is entirely new. The program has effectively declared war on processed foods, which include obvious targets like breakfast pastries and fast food. But it also makes enemies of seemingly benign (or even healthy) foods, like orange juice.

Oranges, on the contrary, are encouraged. In fact, they’re absolutely “free,” zero points, as are all other fruits and most vegetables. That’s because they offer a lot of food per calorie and are loaded with fiber, which makes us feel full even though it passes through the body essentially unprocessed. This somewhat radical move to free fruit drew criticism in the nutritional community, but Kirchhoff dismisses the hand-wringing. He explains the rationale while holding a quart of OJ, which contains the juice of eight oranges. “You could drink this. You may not feel great, but if you ate all the oranges that are in this, you’d feel horrible,” he says. “When we made fruit zero points, a few dietitians said, ‘Fruit has real sugar in it. People can really abuse fruit.’ But there’s so little evidence that people abuse fruit. It takes a while to eat. It’s filling. Could you eat 12 bananas and count it as zero points? Yes. But how would you feel afterward?”

Then and Now

For years, Weight Watchers has been helping people track how much they eat by assigning point values to various foods. In 2010, the company radically altered how it determines these values with a new system called PointsPlus. The result: Some foods suddenly got a lot more expensive. Here’s a look at how things changed.

Points

PointsPlus

2

Banana

0

3

Wine
(6-ounce glass)

5

10

Filet mignon
(3 ounces)

7

6

Glazed doughnut

7

2

Orange juice
(1 cup)

3

4

Domino’s sausage pizza
(1 slice)

8

Photos: istockphoto; Getty Images (pizza)

Weight Watchers was founded in the early 1960s by a Queens, New York, homemaker named Jean Nidetch, who had a key insight: Sustainable weight loss is more achievable with emotional support. She prescribed a simple calorie-deficient diet developed by the New York Board of Health to some overweight neighbors and gathered them at her house for weekly commiseration, progress reports, and empathy. In effect, she took a system based in nutritional science and, instinctively, added a helping of behavioral science. Half a century later, this remains the Weight Watchers fundamental approach: a sound diet backed up by support meetings.

Which is not to say there haven’t been bumps along the way. The company’s darkest days came after its acquisition in 1978 by packaged foods giant H.J. Heinz, which turned the meetings into shill sessions for prepackaged meals. But unlike competitors Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers didn’t require attendees to purchase the food. Low uptake and high overhead—including the cost of freezers and distribution—made for a weak business model. Membership dwindled, and in the mid-’90s, meeting attendance hit bottom.

A few years later, Weight Watchers introduced Points, and the company’s fortunes began to turn. Although it was 95 percent based on calories, with a slight penalty for fat and a slight reward for fiber, the program had simplicity going for it. Rather than counting, say, 1,900 calories in a day, members could track 35 points. It made keeping tabs on food intake easy and even fun—almost gamelike. Membership and meeting attendance jumped as a result. With the company healthy, Heinz was able to sell Weight Watchers to private equity firm Invus for $750 million while retaining a royalty-free license to produce prepared meals, which are available in frozen-food cases. The sale, Miller-Kovach says, was “the best thing that ever happened to the company, in my opinion. We weren’t pickles, baked beans, or soup. It was always like they didn’t know what to do with us.”

At a time when Americans were rushing to embrace fad diets, from Atkins to South Beach, the private equity firm instilled a more analytical mindset that was focused on market testing and peer review analysis, says Miller-Kovach, who joined the company in the early ’90s. Weight Watchers went public in 2001, but the quantitative culture instilled by Invus lives on.

Kirchhoff and Miller-Kovach knew that moving to PointsPlus would tamper with all the success and goodwill the company had engendered since introducing Points. But Kirchhoff decided the time was right. Since its founding, Weight Watchers has been based on a combination of nutrition science and behavior modification. The nutritional science had evolved, so the company needed to as well. “On some level, you operate with belief. We believed it was the principled thing to do,” he says. “We didn’t imagine ourselves being on a calorie-dependent system 10 years from now. “

The transformation required a radical, stealth operation. The company’s more than 12,000 leaders, the emcees who guide the local meetings, were put on PointsPlus so they’d have it mastered before the switch. This meant they were practicing one program while preaching another. Meanwhile, marketing and brochures needed to be updated, new smartphone apps, calculators, and cookbooks had to be developed, and the website needed to be overhauled. Miller-Kovach’s team compiled a new database of some 47,000 foods. All while, even in the executive ranks, people were questioning such a wholesale change. “Do I think at least 90 percent of the people who worked for Weight Watchers regretted Dave asking me that question? Yes,” says Miller-Kovach, referring to the initial meeting with Kirchhoff. “The business had at least quadrupled since the introduction of Points, and very few people in areas of responsibility had been through a program transition. When reality hit, it was big.”

Just after Thanksgiving 2010, Weight Watchers flipped the switch. Says Kirchhoff: “It was as though we went from dollars to euros overnight.”

Considering the plight of the euro lately, there are those who consider the metaphor especially apt. Kirchhoff maintains a fist-pounding but eminently entertaining blog called Man Meets Scale, in which he damns the siren call of M&Ms and breakfast burritos while providing members a way to get his attention. In the weeks after the transition, Man Meets Scale received hundreds of comments. Some accused Kirchhoff of ripping away a security blanket. “Why change a plan that was working?” wrote one commenter. “It seems to me that this is a marketing plan to win over those people who are using other eating plans like South Beach, Zone, Atkins and also a way to sell more products.” And another: “I hate it. I hate learning the new points and losing all my foods that I’ve put in over the last three years. I’m completely annoyed that microwave popcorn is three points now!!!!”

Then there are the experts who are dubious about the scientific validity of PointsPlus. Among them is Gary Taubes, the best-selling author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. He evangelizes and consumes a high-fat, low-carb diet that he contends causes a reduction in insulin levels, which signal the body to burn fat. From his perspective, any system designed to restrict dieters from overeating is flawed. Taubes argues that as long as you’re eating the right foods, you can eat as much as you’d like and stay thin. “What you want to do is to pay attention to fat metabolism and lower insulin levels, not lower calories,” he says. “By building something on calories, you end up being in a constant state of hunger.”

Taubes is especially incredulous about the move to make fruit free, which he says can definitely contribute to weight gain, especially among the obese. “I’m skeptical of the science in any program that allows you to eat as much fruit as you want,” he says.

I tell Taubes that in 12 weeks of researching this story, I’ve lost more than 20 pounds, mostly thanks to PointsPlus. He asks about my diet, and I tell him I eat a lot more vegetables than I did previously and often four or more servings of fruit a day. He shares a story about how he once added five to six pears a day to his diet and gained 15 pounds in six months. “I got rid of the pears and the weight went away,” he says. “Your body would prefer a certain amount of energy to run it. If you feed it less food, you’re going to burn less calories. Your weight loss is very good, but the key is always long-term weight loss. If you do exactly what you’re doing now, will the weight loss maintain—particularly if it requires deprivation?”

It’s the right question. Taubes could be wrong about everything else and still be right to suggest that my pendulum will swing back. The odds are stacked against me and everyone else who has succeeded in shedding a few pounds. According to a study published in late October in The New England Journal of Medicine, weight loss causes a troubling hormonal shift. When deprived of enough calories to shed weight, the body fights back by increasing hunger pangs. Put the same plate of food in front of a 182-pound man who lost 22 pounds (me) and another who has been 182 pounds all along, and in all likelihood, I’ll be the one calling for seconds.

To show how surprising food values can be, newbies are shown a poster with a croissant on one side and a ham-and-egg breakfast on the other. Points-wise, the pastry and the full breakfast are roughly the same.
Photo: Bela Borsodi

So does Weight Watchers really help people succeed for the long term? Even one of the company’s successful partners isn’t sure. Cleveland Clinic, one of the country’s premier heart hospitals, began a program in 2008 to pay for employee memberships to Weight Watchers and fitness centers in the hope of promoting health and reducing health care costs. The results have been impressive. “We had thousands of people join in the first year; the total number who have signed up is now over 16,000,” says Paul Terpeluk, Cleveland Clinic’s medical director of employee health services. The ones who joined Weight Watchers have lost a total of 128,411 pounds over three years, and “we’ve started to slow the rate of increase of our costs,” he says.

But Terpeluk worries that the program is basically a crutch. “Successful weight management is going to be more than Weight Watchers. What if you fall off the wagon and don’t count your points, do you gain the weight back and spiral downward?” he asks. “That’s good business for Weight Watchers. But weight maintenance has more to do with behaviors and less to do with nutrition. It’s a life-transformation approach. People have to take responsibility for their behaviors.”

An hour north of San Francisco, surrounded by Sonoma’s wine country, Santa Rosa, California, offers great weather and enviable access to both culture and nature. But other than that, this medium-size city is not unlike other places in the US. It has traffic jams, big-box stores, budget issues, and a serious weight problem. In the southern part of the city, 65 percent of the adult population is overweight or obese.

It’s 9:30 am on a Tuesday at the Mendocino Avenue strip mall and nearly 60 locals have run, OK, walked, a gauntlet of caloric temptations (Panda Express, Five Guys, Cold Stone Creamery, Starbucks) to squeeze into a Weight Watchers meeting room. This is the company’s nod to Terpeluk’s assertion about lifestyle change and, more directly, its founder’s original insight about the effectiveness of group therapy.

Members pay $42.95 a month to attend regular meetings. That fee also gives them access to Weight Watchers’ digital tools and smartphone apps. More than 43,892 pounds were shed at this location during the first 10 months of 2011. The company knows this because every member steps on a scale upon crossing the threshold.

Today’s session leader is Adrienne Bacigalupi, a cheerful woman who stands at the front of the room in a loud-patterned dress. Handing out medallions, hawking branded water bottles and fitness kits, consoling members about inevitable setbacks: She does it all with a smile. And like all leaders, she’s on the program. After 14 years, she has lost and kept off 50 pounds and proudly displays her before and after photos.

The 30-minute meeting features plenty of cheerleading support for PointsPlus to bring along the newbies and any remaining skeptics. The gathering is short on whining and self-pity and long on accolades, tips, tricks, and laughter. Bacigalupi generously praises everyone who speaks up. “I just gotta say,” she tells one, “you look hot!”

A few attendees offer advice. “For me, walking is so meditative. It just soothes my soul,” says one woman. Adds another, knitting in the front row, “This week I bought almond milk and made a banana shake. That’s one point! Even if you add the banana, that’s still one point!” (The four men in attendance, outnumbered about 15 to 1, are all comparatively silent. Online memberships, which for about $20 a month provide access to online tools but no meetings, also skew female, but at about 85/15, rather than a meeting’s average 90/10.)

After the meeting adjourns, Bacigalupi instructs three tire-kickers on the basics of PointsPlus. She’s holding a poster displaying a croissant on one side and a ham, egg, and toast breakfast on the other. It demonstrates that the pastry costs seven points while the full breakfast costs six. The newbies are flummoxed. She nods empathetically and wades into an explanation of how the body processes different types of calories differently. She tells them this will become more intuitive over time. “The Weight Watchers approach is to change our behaviors and habits,” Bacigalupi says. “This isn’t a diet that you’re going to go through. It’s a new way of life.” The pep talk is remarkably in sync with Kirchhoff’s message, which is pretty impressive given the 3,000-mile separation between the boss and his frontline soldier.

Back in Manhattan, Kirchhoff says the company never could have pulled off the transition without leaders like Bacigalupi. They’re carrying out the vision in a way that makes him feel as good about the company as he does about the new dieting regimen. “Weight Watchers is not a Harvard MBA organization,” he says. “It’s different, funky, and people are really passionate about what they do.”

Kirchhoff’s praise of his leaders is a nod to what makes the original notion behind Weight Watchers hold up even today. The real secret to the company’s success isn’t as much about dissecting the relationship between fat and carbs and protein as it is understanding the links between nutrition, weight gain, and psychology. Not everyone needs a weekly meeting to lose weight, but for many the commiseration and general back-slapping helps. That’s been the Weight Watchers formula from day one. And for now, it seems to be working better than ever. Profits are up. Pounds are down.